As the use of computers and the Internet becomes more and more popular, many different types of software applications (also simply referred to as applications) are developed to perform various tasks. Furthermore, many applications interact with each other as well as with one or more clients or users during operation in order to carry out various transactions between individuals and/or entities (e.g., corporations, government, etc.). A transaction as used herein broadly refers to a series of exchanges between an application and another entity, which may include one or more of a user, another application, a client machine, etc. One example of a transaction is a session that begins with a user logging into an application (e.g., an online sale application, a database management application, etc.) and ends with the user logging out of the application.
Because the applications interact with each other and/or clients, it may be difficult to test and/or debug an individual application as the application interactions have to be manually re-created. Furthermore, as the number of applications increases, and hence, the volume and complexity of application interaction grow, it becomes more and more difficult to manually re-create the application interactions to effectively test the applications.
In addition to the difficulties in testing individual applications, other problems arise while various applications interact with each other during normal operations. For instance, conflict may arise as two or more applications are trying to send requests and/or responses substantially simultaneously to the client. Moreover, as the client receives multiple responses and/or requests from different applications, different and separate user interfaces may be used to present these responses and/or requests to the user, which may lead to user confusion and/or impeded user experience.